The present invention relates to shipping of photofinishing orders and more particularly to a method and system for efficiently sending a plurality of photofinishing orders to a plurality of different customers.
In today""s photofinishing, digital image capture has played an increasing roll in providing greater flexibility to the user forwarding various image products. It has become quite popular to upload digital images to a photofinishing site such as Ofoto website (ofoto.com) wherein a user can store images and order image products such as photographic prints. Not only can the user order any desired number of prints, but the user can also order a wide variety of size prints and additional products. This provides the customer with a large latitude in ordering many different products. This however creates a problem for the service provider in determining the cost for shipping all of the orders back to many respective customers that have placed orders. This entails the need to weigh each and every shipping parcel in order to determine the appropriate shipping costs for each of the packages for each customer order. This requires a substantial amount of handling by the photofinisher which increases the cost that must be passed on to the consumer. Thus, there is a need to provide an efficient manner for determining the shipping cost for a wide variety of orders, each potentially having different shipping costs.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method for automatically determining the shipping weight of a photofinishing order to a customer, from a service provider without physically weighing the photofinishing order, comprising the steps of:
the service provider receiving a photofinishing order from a customer for at least one photofinishing product;
associating an order ID with respect to the photo finishing order;
producing the at least one photofinishing product for the photofinishing order;
assembling the photofinishing order and placing the order within a package, the package having the ID thereon in machine readable format; and
reading the machine readable ID and providing the associated estimated weight on a manifest to be used in shipping the photofinishing order along with a plurality of other photofinishing orders.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention there is provided a system for automatically determining the shipping weight of a photofinishing order to a customer from a service provider without physically weighing the photofinishing order, comprising the steps of:
a computer system for the service provider receiving a photofinishing order from the customer for at least one photofinishing product, the computer system;
associating an order ID with respect to the photofinishing order;
means for obtaining the at least one photofinishing product for the photofinishing order;
a packing station for assembling the photofinishing order and placing the order within a package, the package having the ID thereon in machine readable format; and
a reading device for reading the machine readable ID and obtaining information in determining the associated estimated weight for a plurality of the photofinishing orders in a shipment; and
an output device for providing a manifest to be used in shipping the plurality of photofinishing orders along with a plurality of other photofinishing orders, the manifest providing the estimated weight of each of the photofinishing orders.